A Conversation With Scott Cohen, 2021 EEC Stefan Pollard Email Marketer of the Year

Scott Cohen: "There are certain things that I've done strategically over the years, that at a high level don't change — like, Where do you start?

You always start with welcome. You always start with whatever your version of abandoned cart is. Those are the high touch points. Those are the low-hanging fruit. _How_ changes with every company.

The high level things never change, but the ground level things change all the time and it's always different.

When I was agency-side, I had clients in the same industry. They were competitors, and their lists acted differently. You would think they would act somewhat the same. And they didn't!"

Scott was awarded the 2021 EEC Stefan Pollard Email Marketer of the Year. He's a bona fide email marketing veteran — with the unique combination of traits that requires. Patience, curiosity, a terrific sense of humor and a knack for figuring things out. Looking cool & collected, and (as he says) paddling like a duck the whole time!

If you're wondering how to build an effective email marketing program, or make a good one great, Scott shares some absolute gems in this conversation.

TRANSCRIPT

Matthew Dunn: Good morning. This is Dr. Matthew Dunn host of The Future Of Email. My guest today. Award-winning email marketer, my my, my zoom friend in acquaintance, Scott Cohen!

Scott Cohen: Thanks for having me, Matt. Glad to be here. Finally.

Matthew Dunn: Yay. Yay. We get to talk about about email and, and you are the director of email CRM stuff at Smile Direct Club now, right?

Scott Cohen: Yeah. Yeah. So lead conversion is, is the big goal top funnel. So got email, got SMS under my belt now.

Matthew Dunn: Okay, cool. We can talk about that.

Scott Cohen: Yeah. Get getting into some push as well. So, you know, I'm. I like say learn new stuff every day. It's exciting.

Matthew Dunn: Now I, I have, I have the virtue of some some time and acquaintance with you, but also cheating by reading back through your LinkedIn page.

I mentioned it, but I, I think it's worth highlighting. You were [00:01:00] last year's Stephan Pollard award winner. You're like top dog email marketer the year, last

Scott Cohen: year. I was, yeah. You know, it's, was that a surprise? It was, yeah, it absolutely was. I was like really? Okay, great. I mean, I, I think what you find with email marketers in particular is we're really good at just doing our jobs.

And we kind of forget about tooting our horn, you know, like we're. Yeah. I, I, I think I've seen other people say it, but I've said it too. Like we're kind of the offensive lineman of marketing, right? Like nobody says anything. Nobody says your name, unless something goes wrong. But if, but you it's re you're required to make the offense work.

So it's it, it it's,

Matthew Dunn: yeah. It's, I'm gonna take your analogy and run with it, cuz actually if, if, if, if there was gonna. Poster of, of you know, prototypical email marketer. My, well, it might well have your face on it cuz you never get Ruff. Nah, you always have like a zillion things going, but it's just like, yeah, it's okay.

You know, like a [00:02:00] duck it's swimming really hard underneath, but it's all, but

Scott Cohen: it's oh yeah. The feed, the feed are always going under water. Yeah. The feed are always going underwater. Yeah.

Matthew Dunn: But your analogy about the offensive linemen, I, I I'd extend that and say, you know, email in the digital era still seems like the, like the front line, the contact point.

Of, of, of marketing and where the, you know, where the game really starts. And, and at the same time, it's still kind of the, the, the, the oddball not sexy, you know, not the odd man out, but, but definitely not necessarily. What, when you say marketing, what people think of. Yeah,

Scott Cohen: it's true. Well, and it's, it's one of those things that, I mean, how many times have you been in conversations with people and ran people you don't know and they go, what do you do?

And I go, I do email marketing. Yeah. And I go, oh, you send me spam. Right. And then I go, no, I send you the stuff you signed up for. And you know, like, oh yeah. [00:03:00] I said, I don't, I don't send that other stuff. But then like people just assume. . I mean, it's classic marketing 1 0 1, right? Like that. By the time you're tired of it.

Somebody's finally picking it up. and you know, I was a copywriter in a previous life. I, you know, I pay attention to TV ads. I pay attention to stuff. And by the time I get tired of it, which is a lot sooner than probably normal people. It. That's when it's finally starting to get through to people. And I think email's kind of the same way.

I think there's, like I said, it is like the offensive lineman because there's expectations for how it's supposed to work. And it only becomes a problem when it doesn't work, how people expect it to and, and how it doesn't work. And quotation marks can mean any number of things that any number of people.

Right. So, you know, my. You know, to this day, we'll come in and be like, so you probably, this is probably on purpose, but I got X, Y, and Z from this company, I'm like, that's absolutely on purpose. And then sometimes I'll go, oh, I bet they don't even know that's running. Like, like [00:04:00] there's so many elements to an email program that.

And there's so much change over, right? Like this industry, there aren't many of us, Matt, there aren't many of us, people who stick around really because like you said earlier that the sexy part isn't here, the sexy part is in other channels it's in cuz email is still so cheap. I mean the number of meetings I'm on where the.

75% of the conversation is about budgets and paid social. Yeah. Right. It's cuz we don't spend money, you know, we're an operational expense

Matthew Dunn: almost well that that may be, I mean you may have just hit a, one of the root cause. Reasons why email isn't isn't isn't the facts the marketing is, cuz it isn't there isn't someone going pay the gatekeeper a lot of money to even say hello, right?

Yeah. It's just, you know, chunky chunk, chunky chunk it's And because we all, I think because we all day to day, minute to minute receive and send and. Email. It's like, oh, I do [00:05:00] that. So I know what Scott does. just cuz they hit send on an email, right? It has nothing to do with your

Scott Cohen: JB. It's like copywriting people, everyone thinks, oh I can write, I can be a copyright.

I'm like it's a little different. Like it's a little

Matthew Dunn: now you, you cut your teeth as an intern at Jay Walter Thompson. Talk about a story place to start. Yeah,

Scott Cohen: copywriting. Yeah, I was, that was more like account management type stuff. You know, the, my God, that was 2003. Wow. 2003. Yeah. I mean, spent a summer doing, you know, commuting into Washington, DC from Northern Virginia, you know, built reports.

Did you know whatever was necessary? I wanted to cut my teeth. Yeah. Did that for a bit and then went, no, I actually wanna do writing rather than that stuff. And so. Yeah, I was, I was writing six to 10 TV and radio scripts a day. Wow. In my beginning years, it was a [00:06:00] small, small ad agency in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where I went to school at James Madison.

And they did production in house and then did the media buys as well. So like, I literally got to like hand the script off to the videographer and then he'd go run off. And I mean, we're talking like the local. Car dealers. Yeah. And the, the, the law offices and, you know, the real estate agents and stuff like that.

So ,

Matthew Dunn: it was, but I would bet tell me if I'm wrong. I would bet that you developed some, you know, mindset, habit, you know, I four things that you use every day, all day still.

Scott Cohen: Oh yeah. I mean, the, the, the, the ability to. I mean, I use that experience now. I mean, I'm an email guy, but I work with the creative team all the time and I can speak their language because of that.

Right. And I can go, oh, I need this. And I need that. And it needs to be this way and this should be shortened and the order should be like this and, you know, and stuff like that. And I mean, the number of. I mean, literally writing a [00:07:00] commercial and then clicking the stopwatch and reading it out loud slowly.

So they could work in 30 seconds or 60 seconds. Right. yeah. Yeah. And then going, wait, I don't wanna kill my voice over artists, so let's cut this and cut that and, and stuff like that. And then, you know, doing layouts for print and I mean, I've. I'm God, I feel like I'm, I'm old school in a lot of ways.

Like I've worked in print and direct mail and you know, I wrote websites and all this other stuff. So I feel like I've had like email when I fell into it. Like everybody does, like, it made sense because I could finally see the results. Of what I did. Right? Like, and direct results. Not like results. Yeah.

Oh, you know, we drove 10% more conversions, but it could have been anything, right. It was no, this email drove this, this email drove this. And so that's what, like, it clicked the, I'm not a terribly analytical person, but it like clicked to go, oh, I can see what I'm doing. and [00:08:00] then extrapolate why I think certain things are happening.

Right.

And

Matthew Dunn: then learn from that and, and refine it. And yeah, next time around do something slightly different. It it's interest. That you said you spent time in, in, in, in actual, like physical media as well, because

Scott Cohen: I had, oh, I did press checks and everything, man. Like I went to the printers and was looking at the registrations and going bump up the black and do this.

And that's not

Matthew Dunn: uncommon in the email marketing space for, for people who stick with it long enough to say that's the space they're in for them to have done direct marketing or print or something like that. So, and which, which is an interesting. For the, the field of practice, cuz you know, like finding a 19 year old, who's done direct marketing.

There aren't any right. I don't know where they're hiding if there are. Yeah. Cause my mailbox still get stuff in it, but not much. Well,

Scott Cohen: direct mail is making a comeback, right? Like when I was at purple we had. We had a huge, [00:09:00] I mean, not, I mean, we didn't send everybody under the face of the sun, but we had a really good, we had really good success with direct mail.

Interesting. And, you know, I think, especially with like the considered, I mean, God, I, I still go through the, what is it, how many versions of. Like the local ads, you know, you get like the Valpak of course. Yeah. But then you get like, what was it? The hometown. And there's a couple other ones here where you just flip through and go, what are the restaurants or this or that, or, or whatever.

And I go, these only exist because they still work. Right. That's fair. And like, and I feel like, you know, email's gonna work forever because everyone's like, oh, well, teens don't use it. Well, they do. Yes, they do. yes,

Matthew Dunn: they do. Well, you, you can talk to that really authority cuz you, you spent some, you spent a, a couple years, at least guiding email in the university space, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Big, big channel for university Western governors university,

Scott Cohen: right? Mm-hmm yeah. Yeah. That was it was interesting. That was like [00:10:00] the. That's how that's, where I fell into email was, was Western governors. It was you're writing this stuff. Why don't you just do it? Okay. Right. And that's when I fell in love with like, you know, the building of the programs.

Cause I had done, you know, Back in high school, done HTML, like basic web got the old geo cities days, the angel fire days. Right. You know, building Microsoft front page was a godsend. Do you remember that? Remember front page and then. The old days where you'd put like little counters at the bottom to see how many people showed up to your little stupid site.

You know, those are the old days, but like, those are the, like the, the little creative things. Like I like to say, I know enough of a lot of things to be dangerous. Hmm. And, but to your point, going back to email, like yes, very effective channel. The university was a little different at that point because it was like we were driving phone calls.

So like the metrics were a little bit harder, but we could tell when certain things went out, [00:11:00] because phone call volume went up, right. Phone volume went up or you know, if we did the monthly newsletter, Applications went up, you know, stuff like that. So like we had moments in time where it's like, we had the direct and then the indirect metrics as well.

But yeah, it was a huge thing. And then you had to design a program for people who may think about when you think about going back to school, people can come to you raising their hand at any point in that decision process, they could be ready to go, or they could be like, I'm just thinking about it. I might go back in two years.

And so you have to design a flow that covers the whole. and so I built this program to go, okay. And I'm hoping that God, 13 years later they've rebuilt it. And I think they have, but you know, it's been a lot of years that the, if you stayed in each stage of the program for the max amount of time, it was six years of email boy.

Oh

Matthew Dunn: boy. Oh boy. Yeah. Yeah. Like you said, it's that kinda lifespan. Yeah. You're You're about [00:12:00] five, six years away from, from the straight up college deludes as your, as your, your, your kids hit that bracket. But college is an interesting, I don't wanna talk about it and print. My God, the glossies that show up when you have a college bound kid, it's we had, we had a basket, two boys, right?

Both, both finished with the college now, but we had a basket for all of the, sorry, the college porno, that was in the mailbox and every campus. Oh, gorgeous and leafy and green.

Scott Cohen: And, but you know what, those aren't for the kids, those are for the parents, which is what's, which is what's funny. Right? Like the kids might leaf through it, but.

It's the it's it's

Matthew Dunn: parrot board. I I'm actually I'm I'm of mind the sample set it too. Based on, based on watching my sons go through their, I got them email addresses relatively early on mm-hmm cause I've been in the space. I, so you're gonna need your own email address. You don't need stuff coming to dad's books.

We've [00:13:00] gotta email addresses and they. And then as they hit the on ramp college on ramp and, and that age bracket, not, you know, whether someone goes to college isn't necessarily think that does it. That's when email starts. Become a gotta do. And yeah, you gotta pay attention to it. They, they were safe ignoring it and, and being on various other digital channels until about 17, 18.

And then all of a sudden it was like, nah, this is part of, this is part of that growing up land stuff is you get an email address and you gotta pay attention to it. Tough.

Scott Cohen: Yeah. I mean, my, my oldest, my, you. Has an email address through school, but I, I think it's literally just a login, right? Like it's like they don't use the inbox for that.

They use inbox, you know, my, my, my oldest will be 13 in a month and she will use, I mean, you know, teachers will communicate through that, through that. And I think the teacher communication gets to your point, like more email [00:14:00] centric. And less about like right now we get like, the schools will send us stuff and it's like, here's an email.

And then they call five minutes later to go, go check your email, which I just, yeah. I'm like, oh, the school's an email courier. Got it. Did you get my email? But you know, I think, but my oldest also has like a personal account that she'll use for like, you know, she's a big Harry Potter person. So it was like Pottermore.

And then Like, I think Minecraft and a couple other things, like some of those gaming things she does with her friends,

Matthew Dunn: like, oh, the sign. Yeah. So like the signup bracket, if nothing else, right. Oh, I wanna use X shoot. I wanna sign up or I wanna sign up and I don't want dad going why'd you sign up for that?

So I need my own email address yeah. Yeah.

Scott Cohen: So I think there's that. And I think they're less inclined to give out phone numbers. Like I know someone's like give an email or give a phone number. Email does supply a modicum of. Control. Oh, control and a wall. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You can do that more actively with email, which is a benefit and a curse, obviously for marketers, but [00:15:00] she's also not at an age where marketing appeals.

Right. So not yet, which is good, cuz. No, I don't doesn't need, doesn't need to get cynical just yet. Yeah.

Matthew Dunn: You know, we're gonna, we, we're gonna be swimming in the waters of marketing for, you know, for kind of forever, if nothing else. Mm-hmm, the business model of, so of, so many digital channels is. You know, ad and marketing supported ad and marketing centric.

So I, I don't see Google rewiring and say, we're gonna charge for search. Don't think that's gonna happen. Right. So we're going, I don't think they could content monetized. Yeah.

Scott Cohen: Yeah. I, I, I, I mean, they've talked about Twitter going private, you know, with, with subscriptions and I, I think if you start there mm-hmm , if you start with the free model yeah.

To get people to pay, especially with the just inundation of like, I don't go on [00:16:00] TikTok because I'm already sucked in the Instagram now. And I held out on Instagram for a long time. right. Like, you're talking about that attention that yes. Yeah. That, that attention space. And I remember when, you know, Gmail tabs became a thing and everybody was freaking.

and then, you know, the, the smarter people in the space are like, just give it a minute. People will go and figure out how they want to use the inbox. Yeah. And promotions. Tap is not a bad thing. If people go there, they're in the mood to shop.

Matthew Dunn: Right. Yeah, yeah. Or deal hunt

Scott Cohen: or whatever. Yeah, exactly. So it's like, it's not, and I, and I think like Instagram is getting close to being unusable, cuz the ads are like, there's a point where the ads are the product and Instagram is getting oh really interesting.

Yeah. Like it's like the ads are every. Like every other thing now, or some sort of sponsored post and I go, no, I came here to see what the people I follow do. Yeah. Yeah. If you [00:17:00] sprinkle this, that's fine. But if it's every other one. Yeah. It's, it's becoming unusable. Well,

Matthew Dunn: even. YouTube has that problem now to me.

Yeah. Like, yeah. And, and a five second, you know, gotta watch this before. Okay. I get it. You gotta pay the bandwidth bill fine, but they're getting more insistent on two furs and stuff. And it's just like, and at the same time, I think not to go off on a tangent, but I think YouTube will withstand that because there's content.

Value for my attention there, right? Like you got a, got a thing that my son and I need to do with his van. And we found this amazing do this, do this, that cable, that tutorial on YouTube. That's a mechanic shot. It's like, I'll watch a commercial sky. This guy's gonna save our bacon on this particular challenge.

Of course I'll watch the commercial. I'm not gonna consciously do anything with it. [00:18:00] It's just gonna go in one ear and out the. But Okey dokey we'll do that. And email has not, I know there are companies in the email advertising business without naming names, but I rarely get an email where the email, where, where there's something asking for attention, like off topic, you know, sponsored by completely separate company.

Pretty rare in my inbox. You, yeah,

Scott Cohen: I would say. That would be a miss, right? Like it would be like, it needs to be targeted in that way. Like if I was ever to go down that route as an advertiser to buy space and something else, like, I don't want it to be outta left field. Like, I, I don't need, you know, car parts and then I'm selling them, you know, ice cream, you know, like, I mean that.

On a hot day, you might want ice cream, but, but you know what I'm trying to say, like, it needs to be like, why would a car parts place advertise for ice cream? You know, it

Matthew Dunn: could, [00:19:00] I, I agree. I agree with you. And, and given what we said, what you said earlier about the relative cost of an email program, it'd be like, do it yourself to your actual customers.

But yeah, I, I subscribe for a variety of reasons. I, I, I get a couple of emails. I forgot big a day about intellectual property. And they have ads in them and the ads are the most orthogonal and stupid things at times. I'm like, why is there a bikini next to that article about patents? I don't understand.

This makes no sense to me. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Just blast it in there. Like, and I don't think it, that's not email marketing. That's like using the channel for a completely miss purpose in my mind. Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Cohen: And you know what, the thing about email is. You're wrong a lot. Let's put it that way. Like when you test things like maybe those ads work.

Yeah. Yeah. It's true. And we're completely wrong. Someone's paying so yeah, exactly. And that that's the, [00:20:00] you know, people ask me like, well, what, what would you say? You know, if you wanted to get in the email, what, you know what, what's one thing you would say, I'd say one, do you need patients? and two, you need to be willing to be wrong.

That's good. Because 90% of the time your test is gonna fail or be. Yeah. And 10% of the time you might get a win, maybe. Wow.

Matthew Dunn: Wow.

Scott Cohen: In the history of my, my, in the history of my testing, where it was, especially those little incremental things like, oh, we're gonna test this color versus this color. Like I have rarely gotten something, just so.

Great. Like, oh my God. Purple beat blue by 35% in a statistically significant like there's no way, like it just doesn, like people think that that's where the testing is. You're not gonna win that's when you do testing. So you can tell your boss you're testing. And subject clients often are the same way.

Yeah. Like in my experience, I'm glad. It's [00:21:00] like, I think about like, we've done work with some of the AI groups out. I in not in my current life, but in previous lives, I've done that. And I just went. Maybe. Mm we'll see. Mm. And the only times that we got statistically significant results were actually when randomly that campaign got into the Google updates tab instead of promotions I'll Bejo.

And, and we knew whenever we hit updates, open rates were twice.

Matthew Dunn: Interesting. Despite what you said about the promotion

Scott Cohen: step, right? For, yeah. It conversion wasn't any

Matthew Dunn: better conversion wasn't any better. Yeah. I was waiting for that. conversion

Scott Cohen: wasn't any better, but we're like, oh, we must have hit updates for this one, but not the B version.

Weird, you know, like it was, yeah. Yeah. It was very strange. So I mean, but that's, and then the patients to have to run that for a while, right? Like in some cases like you have to run tests. Two months or, you know, a month or at least like somebody goes, oh, you just send one campaign. You've learned something.

No, you've learned what [00:22:00] that campaign did on Monday the fifth.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Glad to hear, glad to hear someone with your experience. Say it, cuz that, that it, it doesn't seem like you get to move the ball a hundred yards with anyone. No

Scott Cohen: throw rarely like, and if the only times you do are, when it's a slam dunk, like I've done it.

Where, when I was at purple, we had, they release. For the, the purple pillow, they released like an insert to make it taller. And so they went, we should mail this to everyone and I went, no, we should mail it just to the people who bought. Before and it killed it just killed. Yeah. You're like, wow. I'm like, that was a no brainer that was low hanging fruit.

Like those are the things you'll win with. And those are things you hang your hat on and then you gotta do the hard work after that.

Matthew Dunn: well, and yeah, you had done the hard work to be in, you know, to be in the conversation to say, No

Scott Cohen: no, no, no. We target people pillow, right? Yeah. I mean it's, but I've also found [00:23:00] in, in my years that what seems like common sense to me isn't mm.

And I think it just comes with experience and I, I think anyone who's had experience of any length of time in any field that I kind of feel like that's the same way. Like maybe that's part of the imposter syndrome where you're like, Isn't this

Matthew Dunn: obvious

doesn't

Scott Cohen: everybody. Isn't this obvious. Yeah. Yeah. So it's

Matthew Dunn: no, no, I, I, I shortened that and I think, I, I think I said it so many times.

My kids smacked me if I say it, but I said, common sense is. . Yeah, it's just not right. It's not, it's very valuable. So when you earn it in a particular field, like, yeah, that's actually why you hire someone in that field? Like they, they think this is all obvious, right? Imposter syndrome aside you'd said, you'd said something earlier.

I wanted to hook back to about that, that the sign signup, you know, the signup role of, of an email address and among the many reasons why. I, I snort coffee through my nose. When I see yet another article saying email's gonna [00:24:00] die. It's like, mm, no, it's not because it's the de facto. Signup me most common signup mechanism by a long margin.

Yeah. And, and, and if nothing else, you, you build a new system, you build SA multiple SAS platforms and you're like, well, how should we have people sign up? And you know what, you're gonna end up on. Email and password, no matter what O other stuff you stick in the way you're gonna end up with that. Why?

Cause it's just how stuff works. Right? They're in control of that address and a zillion other reasons. And the day someone says, we need your text or you can't sign up for our service. It'll be like lost customer too bad. right. Not gonna sign up

Scott Cohen: well, and I, I think about like, they they've made a lot and I think Apple's pushing this way, the whole like password free world that we're apparently pushing toward.

Right. We'll see. But you have to have an underlay. You have to, it has to, yes. There has to be a layer of, yes. Some sort of security slash whatever, you know, you have to have an email address or phone [00:25:00] number could be either one, you know, I'll give you phone number. A lot of people, you know, a lot of other places in the world.

Don't have computers, they have phones mm-hmm but even then they likely have email addresses to some extent. Right, right. And then a password that, yeah. You may not need to have the password all the time, but there needs to have, there needs to be some sort of encryption, some sort of, you know, login element to it.

Yes.

Matthew Dunn: It's me. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's fine. Yeah. Well, I mean, okay, so you touched on it. Let's go there. I'm it, it, it, it seems to me looking from the lens of the email space. that as the, as the intimacy of the smartphone is settled down and there's really two companies that matter in that device space that they're now starting to, to sort of duke it out for making that thing such a fundamental key to your life.

Apple's pass, pass something. I forget what it's called is an example of that Apple's app apple would say, well, [00:26:00] look, you're gonna have this. In your pocket, it's actually better than passwords, cuz you're gonna have this in your pocket. I'm like, yeah, but that means Apple's

Scott Cohen: actually in control of

Matthew Dunn: my login to everything, not me.

And that kind of ticks me off. I don't want that. Yeah. Right. He said maintaining X, hundreds or thousands of passwords voluntarily. Right? Well, I keep doing that. I probably will, but I suspect people might migrate to that because of the device in the. phenomen. And I see the same device in P pocket who controls that device layer.

I see that as mattering in the email space, I, I posted about this a while back, like Gmail's market share of inboxes plus 66% at this point. Right? Why in part, because of their footprint in the pocket. Yeah. And, and be because they, they Because they've got a device that's with you all the time. They can start making moves that'll [00:27:00] matter 10 years down the line.

And it's really apple V Google at

Scott Cohen: that layer right now. Well, and I think that's interesting, right? Cuz the, you know, the, everyone assumes apple has this giant majority. In the, the smart phone space. Right. And that's just not true just in, in the

Matthew Dunn: us you know,

Scott Cohen: slight, slight majority, but Android owns overseas, right?

Like an Android there. So you have Gmail and, and you have to have a Gmail address. Imagine that to have an Android phone. So, yeah. You know, Gmail is better. Than apple mail. Agreed. And I say that as someone who has an iPhone and I don't use the apple mail, like anything. So like, I mean my work email, doesn't go through it.

My personal Gmail doesn't go through it. Like, so, and I might be weird. You said I might be weird. God, I've had Gmail since 2004, you know, so it's, and I, I don't use the first email address I have because the one thing I hate about Gmail is that they don't respect periods. [00:28:00] Like, you know, I have Scott dot Cohen.

Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. And you can have anything with that and I'll get the email. I've gotten emails for people in New York. I've gotten legal contracts. I've gotten like all sorts of stuff. And I usually go like wrong person, wrong person. This looks important. But yeah, it's the battle for the inbox is, is, is interesting.

I have, I still have a Hotmail account and I only use it for Amazon because I had Hotmail and Amazon free Gmail and I just never moved it over and I'm like, ah, it's fine.

Matthew Dunn: Well, it's a good, and it's good education in particular field to still have a Hotmail account, right? Yeah. Watch it. Watch what it does it blow your doors.

Nobody has played an effective game of ketchup ball with Gmail, kind of it kind of like kind of baffles me does no one else. See the utility value of that. Wow. Microsoft. Yeah. I Yahoo.

Scott Cohen: None of those guys. Well, I think it's also ridiculous that nobody's come up with a standard for rendering, like any [00:29:00] semblance of a standard for rendering.

You mean email rendering? Yeah. Like email, like it's and yeah. You know, for all these, all these guys that come out and say we're all about the customer, could you make it look good? So that it's usable. Mm-hmm

Matthew Dunn: mm-hmm and no, yeah. It's it's it's odd. We gotta look in the mirror and say, and there's not enough of an industry body in the email space to come up with a committee to come up with a standard and say, all you guys use this, right?

Yeah. It's not, it's not gonna happen. Email HTML is going to suck probably for the rest of our lives.

Scott Cohen: Yeah. It's always fun. When you show email code to a web developer and their head just goes,

Matthew Dunn: yeah, head explodes. I haven't seen tables since I was a kid. Right. Yeah. something like that.

Scott Cohen: can you guys use this?

Nope. Can you use this? Nope. Can you use this? Nope. it's. Why not? Cuz we have to have it. Make sure it renders a Microsoft word [00:30:00] for outlook. Right. And outlook has gotten better. Has it? I will say that. Yeah, it's gotten better. It's especially on mobile. Like I have mine in dark. Because I'm like, I need one in dark mode just to like I personally, yeah, it's funny.

Like I'm mostly light mode, but Twitter I'm dark mode and outlook on dark mode. Huh. But on my phone, everything else is light mode. I don't know why. Maybe cuz I'm doom scrolling on Twitter at night, but but yeah, it's it? Yeah. It it's always, it's hard to remove your marketer hat from your user hat. Mm. Like. Like, I, I will never be a normal customer ever again. Right. Like we can't be. Yeah, that's fair. So that's why I think was it, when my copywriter days I read you know, David OVI on advertising and stuff like that.

And he said, you know, your customer's not an idiot. She's your wife. And so like my, I use my wife all the time. Like, what would you think of this? And even then like, just through osmosis, I think she's gotten a little bit more marketing savvy over. [00:31:00] Yeah. However many years I've been doing this, so yeah. Yeah.

But I still go, like, what do you think about this? And she's like, oh, that's terrible. And then, yeah. So it's, , it's a, it's good to have that like outside view on things.

Matthew Dunn: Well, so we've, we've agreed somewhat implicitly that there are some aspects about email that aren't going to change, HTL, rendering, et cetera.

What is gonna change? What's what's some of the future hold, what do you. You know,

Scott Cohen: I've been giving this a lot of thought and the honest answer is, I don't know, you know, I don't like like broad terms. Right. You know, I, I think that it's going to. I would say this isn't changing necessarily, but it'll only get like it'll change, but only for the worse, right.

Is I think that it'll con the inbox will continue to be more crowded. That as much as you know, the channel's been told that it's dying for years, [00:32:00] which is, I think at this 0.1 it's wrong. And two, I should probably stop saying anything about it. Like Amazon, for example, just came out. Yeah. And they're, they're gonna start for their merchants.

They're gonna start allowing them a limited set of emails to send out to the customers they have through Amazon. Cuz Amazon's a black box. Right. So like in my current world we have our oral care line that we have our direct and then there's like the Amazon store mm-hmm and mm-hmm we don't know this.

We don't know the mesh point of, you know, customers who get our emails and then go to Amazon. Right, right. Which I think one. Amazon has a crap ton of merchants. So it's, it's good for the merchants. It may not be good for the customer, but it looks like, and we don't know enough. I mean, this is literally what a week or two ago that they announced this.

And I saw the article and it looks like it's like repeat customers, best customers. And there's a third [00:33:00] audience in. You know, limb there's, they're putting in guardrails. Like you can only mail this group once every 14 days. And I, I would assume that they're building one, they're protecting themselves because if they have to manage yeah.

All the deliverability there that's a nightmare two. I haven't seen the terms, but I would imagine they'll throw people off in a hurry. Yeah. They'll have to, they'll have to be even, they'll have to be even more. I wouldn't say punitive, but strict then, like MailChimp, for example. Yeah. So, you know, it.

It'll be interesting to see what happens there, but if you open and I don't know if there's like a vetting process where you have to be qualified for the program and stuff like that, like, or they're just gonna go, Hey, you have these three programs go for 1.5 million merchants or whatever they have on there.

It'll be, and I know it's still in beta and it's like we're six months out, I think for for GA on that. But that'll be interesting to watch because. How many people are gonna see that as Amazon versus the brand. [00:34:00] Right. Right. And then even though it's every two weeks, if you've ordered from 150 merchants, It's a lot of stuff.

It's gonna get really interesting. A lot of stuff. Yeah. And so that's something to watch. I would say that the political, you know, decision of Gmail and the FEC with, you know, it's not a hundred percent certain how much they're going lax on the rules for political emails, but lacks than they already are in terms of filtering.

I'm not sure. What the impact that that's gonna be the politic, the people who are politically active will, right? Yeah. But I don't know how much they just grab less and email people. Right. Like just random people. Right. Like, I don't know how bad that is. Yeah. And if that's gonna get worse, like, it's one of those, like, I don't know.

I don't know how bad it's gonna be, but I know it's gonna make it hard. Even more, even harder than it is now. I think it's gonna cause, and this is true and it's [00:35:00] smart marketing. It's gonna cause email marketers to work more closely with other channels within their organization, because we talked about that attention economy earlier.

Like you're gonna have to use other channels to drive action and vice versa, right? Like there should be more of that cross channel feel

Matthew Dunn: fall and say, did you get my email text and say, did you get my email? did

Scott Cohen: you see my Instagram ad? You know, , but I think about the things that I've bought in the past year that I normally wouldn't have bought, have come from paid social.

Oh, really getting my attention. And then I sign up. Yeah. Get their emails for a bit, get the offers and convert. Yeah. Yeah. So, and I'm an email marketer. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm acting that way. Yeah. So

Matthew Dunn: it's, you know, you know what you're signing up for quite literally

Scott Cohen: yeah. Literally. So it's I, I think that there's gonna need to be more of that and, you know, putting yourself in a position as an email marketer to, I mean, I did a whole talk on it at the EEC conference about metrics beyond opens and [00:36:00] clicks, like and direct last click attribution because it's crap.

It's crap. I mean, it's, it's fair, but it's crap. And so getting how, how you spin up support for other channels and broader campaigns and how you make yourself look good in this just garble detention economy. Yeah. Yeah. Will, will. I think it it's only gonna get worse. It's not gonna get better. The,

Matthew Dunn: Just a quick side note on the Gmail F E C deal.

I I, I. What's the word I'm looking for. Road heard on a discussion about that topic a couple of weeks ago, and I was pleasantly educated, surprised when some of the more deeply technical deliverability folks and some with the real footprint in the political email space said, we looked at the sign.

To become a certified whatever sender of political email on Gmail and the bar is so [00:37:00] cotton pick and technically high, a almost nobody's gonna qualify B if they're doing all that stuff already, they're already in the inbox. so interestingly enough, Google's getting Ben Thompson would call it a strategy credit.

They're gonna get the, oh, look, you're you're playing level playing field out there in the world of political emails. But truthfully, if, if they kept the bar that high, they're probably not gonna have enough people sign up where it's really that much work. Well, that's good. Yeah. That's good. It's probably good.

That's good.

Scott Cohen: It's probably net good. Yeah. Well, it it's sort of like apple when they turned to privacy a few years ago and it's like, Yeah, it's more, more of a strategy credit strategy than anything else. Yeah. So it's. It, it it's a PR play. Right? Like they, if they do this one, they're keeping really, they're keeping the bar where it should be, but two they're getting political parties off their asses about it.

Right. So, yeah. Yeah. Like, oh, you wanna do this? Just do this. Just like everybody else. Oh, okay.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Let me throw a different future of email curve ball at you just springing off [00:38:00] your, the inbox is gonna get even busier. I. Text the other day, which is in itself. Interesting. Get a text from a close friend of mine.

She's a, she's a counselor. Like she has nothing to do with tech would probably say, ah, I don't like that stuff, but she read an article about one of the, one of the platforms out there that, that it's an AI writer. And she said, this kind of bothers me. It seems like cheating that an, you know, you'd have an AI write your letter, article, whatever else.

So I went and found an article about Dolly, the, the AI art generator and sent it back. And I said, strap on strap on my friend. Yeah. It's going to get even noisier wide because the, the work of making bad text and bad. is gonna get outsourced to Silicon, which means we're gonna get more of it, which means the inbox is gonna have even more crap in it.

Yes, [00:39:00] for sure. I mean,

Scott Cohen: why , I've always people go, why does spam exist? I go, cuz it works cause

Matthew Dunn: yeah. And cuz it doesn't have big cost. Exactly.

Scott Cohen: Yeah. That's why it works. Right. If the cost of entry was high. They wouldn't do it. Right. And if I've always said, like, if you can send a million emails and get one purchase that covers the cost, you're gonna keep sending a million emails

Matthew Dunn: in your inbox.

Right. yeah. I

Scott Cohen: mean, it, it is the double edged sword of the channel, right? Like we are cost efficient and that's a good thing and a bad. So, you know, these AI drivers, you get a lot of these one person shops. I've been a one person team before, you know, it's if you don't have to worry about certain pieces of your program yeah.

It's just built for you. I mean, why wouldn't you, why wouldn't you? Right. And so I'm not, and the scary thing is the smart people in the room will go, let me write something and then put it, put it up against the [00:40:00] AI. what happens at the AR I, AI starts winning more often than not. And that, and you know, there are some companies out there that, you know, some of the AI for subject lines and things like that, that that's, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, , you know, that's their, their bail wick.

Right. That's what they say. Yeah. And so you know, what happens if that happens? Oh my God. Like, if you're re it's, it's a brilliant play for those companies. If they can prove the, the concept, right. If they can, they can do it. It gets scary because then you're removing limitations and it, again, that you're removing even more

Matthew Dunn: cost yes.

From the channel. Yes. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. That's a big that's, that's a big deal. And while it may be, well, the whole channel working maybe cost efficient, what's always irked to me about it will always irk about it is, is actually the, it is not attention efficient. Right. It treat. End user attention [00:41:00] as an externality.

Oh, it doesn't matter if he's got 30,000 unread matters to me, but oh well

Scott Cohen: but you could, I mean, the cynical side of me goes, you could

Matthew Dunn: unsubscribe

Scott Cohen: well, Boulder staff, but I was just saying the other side of it is. Yes. Sometimes all you need is seeing it in the inbox. You don't even open it. You don't click it.

You don't do anything. You just go, oh yeah, I'll go order. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when I worked at 1-800-CONTACTS that happened all the time, people, you know, it's like your bill is due. Oh, I'll go pay my bill. Like it's it's you don't need. you don't necessarily need the active engagement to get what you want.

Right. Right. And that's why, and that's why, which is scary because , because that makes the whole use case and the whole concept of AI writing, like, well, if it just matters being there, then we can just do the work to get you there. Right. And that's scary, but it depends on. That's but at the, the other side of it is the [00:42:00] re the reason that we exist, Matt, you and I exist is because it's not that easy.

Once you get beyond the first layer, like, if all you care about is burn and churn. Yeah. Then AI's fine. But if you want to get smart, Yeah. Is AI there, I mean, and could, and you know, AI's getting smarter about segmentation. It's getting smarter about this, but you still have to have somebody that feeds all the stuff in right.

And monitors the output. And I, I mean, I hate to say, you know, humans will always be needed for that kind of work, but yeah. You know, if you're sitting there as a copywriter going, I can't write the same damn subject lines 35 times. Let me ask this computer to give me some ideas. It's not a bad.

Matthew Dunn: True. Yeah.

And, and the, the notion that the notion that AI is a different level of cheating than Excel , I mean, honestly, come on when I [00:43:00] side story, but funny when when I've gone through the exercise of a branding, various things, company services, whatever else, one of my own cheat codes is I think of all the words I can throw 'em in a.

And then put 'em down column a and across row one and Excel, and then write a formula that just goes, join them and then start reading the combinations in a variable. It's like son of a gun. I never would've thought to put those two things together, but that's actually kind of. compelling. So is that, is that cheating?

Is that outsourcing the, yeah, whatever. I don't care. I don't care. right.

Scott Cohen: yeah. I, I don't think it is. I think it's, I think when you use it in place of human capital. Hmm that's when, and this is, that's the, I mean, that's the future of the world, right? Like how much is human capital versus technological capital.

Yeah. And, and that, and that, you know, [00:44:00] Percentage is changing every year, which we're not even gonna get into the politics of and everything like that. Cuz we don't have seven years to talk about it. But like that's, you know, we talk about like the history of email or the future of email, you know, that's, it's like how much of it becomes AI driven, like, you know, the CDPs of the world and you know, what's the over the tech overlap there and how much of that you.

The CDPs are trying to get, you know, their white listing, you know, send grid or Twilio or, or whatever. Like they're, you, they're doing all of that because they know that if they can present somebody with a OneStop solution, they're fine. Right. And then you have the people, there's the philosophical argument of everything in one bucket versus mm-hmm, pick the technology that is experts at what you want them to do separately, right?

Yes. Yeah. And, or, and usually most companies are somewhere in between mm-hmm Yeah. I, I just think that's where the future lies is, like understanding that the job's gonna get harder and it's gonna get harder for everybody. I mean, think about [00:45:00] how much hit, how much of a hit Facebook took with iOS 14.5 and how much of a hit really not a hit on email, but you know, the, the male privacy protection is having an impact.

Yeah. But I think it's, it's forcing marketers to focus on what matters. Which is conversion, you know, I mean, but you you've mentioned the email advertisers, like those guys probably taken a hit. Right. Because they were based off of opens and eyeballs, not necessarily conversions. Yeah. So yeah.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. The, the bikini, the bikini in the in the, yeah, exactly.

Scott Cohen: Yeah. Right. Like, so, and it's like, oh, we're getting 55% open right now. No, not really. So yeah. It's. It's an interesting world, man. It really is. It's an interesting world. And, and like, I, my, my kids, you know, they're 12 and eight and they've never known a world without an iPhone. Right. [00:46:00] Yeah. And they've never, I think, God, I, you know, the rotary phone.

Is not something. I mean, I'm well, I'm young enough that rotary foam was mostly aged out by the time, you know, I was using phones, but I still knew how to use one so,

Matthew Dunn: and you still got to do direct mail and I,

Scott Cohen: I did some, I, Hey, I did direct mail like a year ago. Like it's the direct mail is, is a thing because you find where, I mean, think about email broke through.

because the mailbox was silly and you could take it anywhere with you, right? Like the, the mobility of email is what had a catch on now. The inbox is insane. Yeah. So of course your mailbox at home, your outside mailbox, the physical piece, even if you don't use it, I mean, how excited do you get. When you get mail.

I mean, at RH there's a lot of [00:47:00] bills, but you know, it's, it's, it's a little different, but like when I was a kid yeah. If I got a piece of mail, oh my God. Yeah. It was a big deal.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. It's a big

Scott Cohen: deal. Yeah. And that, that really hasn't gone away for the stuff I actually wanna get, like, you know, my golf digest and stuff like I'm like, yes, it came.

Yeah. And so. Or just the sheer volume of Amazon boxes.

Matthew Dunn: that weekend. Well, totally. And I, I, I, I like, Ooh, what's in that Amazon box. Cause I forgot what the heck, even though it was probably, you know, one or two days ago, I forgot what the heck

Scott Cohen: it was. well, and does your wife use your account

Matthew Dunn: for prime? You know what?

Oddly enough, we have two separate prime accounts, idiot. But we can't seem to find the discipline to, to, to reconcile.

Scott Cohen: let this be the time. Cause my wife uses uses mine. Yeah. For, for every time of year except buying my Christmas presence. Yeah. Like she has her own just for that. Right. So nine outta 10 times.

I have no clue what's coming [00:48:00] up to the door. Like what did you order? Oh, I got this. All right. So,

Matthew Dunn: okay. Yeah. Okay. Whatever. Yeah. yeah. Oh, I had, I had. Ooh. I had a thought and it flew right outta my head about about that channel. Let me ask you this question while we, as we, as we head towards wrap up here you handled, you said you handled text messaging as well and push yeah.

You push.

Scott Cohen: Okay. Yeah. We're starting to get in the push.

Matthew Dunn: Yep. How are as a super experienced email marketer? What's it feel like getting your hand on the knobs for those channels? How different are they?

Scott Cohen: SMS is really effective. Mm-hmm I was, I mean, I, I kind of knew it, but like that is the classic, what you do personally, you should not affect onto other people because I can't stand SMS in terms of a shopping channel.

Like I hate it. Right. Yeah. But people love it. And so it's really effective. It is the little intricacies of. [00:49:00] Like the number of segments and like how you build them and like the characters and special characters and how like, like SMS is a cost center. Mm-hmm like email is not really a cost center. Right.

But SMS is a cost center. So that's its cost. Every message costs and every 160 slash 154 characters costs. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, you know, you really get into like, testing becomes really interesting. It becomes more about how much do I have to say. The old email, like, oh, only do one CTA and make it short.

Like, but you can do, you could do a fricking novel in an email if you wanna do. I mean, have you seen Costco's emails? They don't care. They cut off on Gmail every time I get one, but clearly it works because they keep doing it. I hope, I hope it's not just, you know, they're just throwing stuff out there, but but SMS, you could write a novel.

Yeah, but you'd have to pay . Yeah. So much. And especially [00:50:00] internationally, like, you know, the things I've learned like UK is 10 times as expensive as the us. Wow. Really interesting. Wow. So like eight to 10 times, I can't remember the exact number, but it's like absurd. And so you find yourself going, do we need two segments?

Do we need three segments? Can we do this without an image? Because an image costs four times as much as a regular SMS. Right. Do you need the image or not? Emojis make segments become 70 characters instead of 160 or 154. So, and like special characters like trademarks, you know, stuff like that. Like those make a difference in your costs.

And so a lot of your testing becomes that becomes segmentation of. do we need these people? It it's actually, it's almost like email a little bit on steroids in that you have the cost driving. A lot of the, you could have the cost driving a lot of strategy because you go, we wanna find where we're most efficient at the least cost mm-hmm

Yeah. And, and I, and I really like that. And push is, we're not there yet. Like we're in the infancy stages. That'll be interesting to see as well, but you know, you'd [00:51:00] have to have an app to follow up with that. Right. So, That's where you know that that's stuff we're building on right now, but SMS is really fascinating because you can sit there and go, we may need one segment for this group.

We may need four for this group. It just depends. And then making sure that four segments are actually four segments

Matthew Dunn: and, and area code's no longer reliable predictor of place. So

Scott Cohen: at least, well, especially if you're using short codes, like most marketers do it doesn't really matter. So yeah. Well,

Matthew Dunn: no, I'm talking about the customer place.

Yeah. Yeah. So, no true. So you have very little, they're a cipher, right? They're, they're attended to cipher for a while. And, and maybe that one of the cost justifications for that CDP vendor who keeps bugging you is if you tell us if we can actually learn more about these guys, Then we can, you know, segment manage, et cetera, cuz we can't just blast at them all the time.

yeah, it's too cut and pick and expensive. And

Scott Cohen: the one and the, yeah, the other [00:52:00] piece of that is you don't really get engagement metrics, right? Like you could get some clicks through don't backend UTMs, but the whole it's 98% open rates, like sure. , they might look at it just to get rid of the bubble, you know, like they aren't actually reading it.

Right. There's no, but there's no like litmus level, not as far as I know, happy to be proven wrong there. Cuz believe me, I'd want them don't want those metrics, but like you don't get the reads. You don't get, you get some of the click information. Do they convert in the same session? Yeah, I don't. That's where last click becomes kind of that, you know, who knows?

So it's but it is highly effective.

Matthew Dunn: I will say that. I'm glad I'm actually, I'm intrigued to hear you say that. And, and SMS mobile device first. I mean, there may be, you know, geeks like me who look at their messages on their, on their, you know, desktop, but we're, we're not many of us. Right. So mobile first it's a lifetime address.

I think that matters. Like, I'm [00:53:00] not changing mobile numbers. No Uhuh, right? Not anymore. No, no, no, not anymore. So the asset, the value of that asset and your relationship pinned to those 10 characters, it's big. It's a big deal, right? If, if, if you say yes for a long time, that's really useful to your business.

I subscribe to a couple of, you know, one was golf. One was something else. Text messaging, marketing, texting things, just to, just to see what happens. Sure enough, like you said, when the, when the sucker goes up, if nothing else, I make the ball go away, cuz yeah. It interrupted me. It got, and I always looked well, that's

Scott Cohen: the thing, right?

Like it's incredibly intrusive. It's incredibly intrusive and yet effective for now. Whereas like email. Yeah. Yeah. No and no, no, but, but like I think about a test I ran where, you know, to, to test costs. Right. And we went, we we've been sending twice a week. And it was like, well, do we need to send twice a week?

Or can we send once a week? Right. And so I carved out a piece and [00:54:00] went, okay, well, these people get once a week, the rest will get twice a week as normal. Let's see what happens over six weeks. Again, patients, you have to let it run for a while. You gotta have enough volume. Yeah. To get statistical significance.

And the twice a week was not just double. It was incremental. Wow. Growth. Wow. And so I was like, oh, okay. Then now we know that now your business can be completely.

Matthew Dunn: That's true. The nature of your business is a big piece of this. Like the, the text about it's always on sale, miraculously, the text about golf stuff.

At some point I'm like, oh, how do I unsubscribe? Right. Because I'm actually right. Yeah. I don't, I don't buy that much golf stuff, never going to,

Scott Cohen: but I think that's the going back to the future and, you know, I get. What do I, what do I need to think about? Like, I get new people who are newish to the industry that ask me questions and I'm happy to do it and love having those conversations, but it's like, there are certain things that I've done strategically over the years, that at a high level don't [00:55:00] change, you know, like where do you start?

You always start with welcome. You always start with a, so whatever your version of abandoned card is, like, those are the, those are the high touch points. Those are the high, those are the low hanging fruit, right? How you. Changes with every company you work for company. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's no like prescribed, oh, you do a three email series for this.

You do a three email series for that. Like there's no, like that might be a starting point, but then you have to build out. Right. And then, so it's like the thing, the high level things never change, but the ground level things change all the time and it's, and it's different and it's different based on every, I mean, you would think I was agency side for a while.

I had clients in the. Industry. They were competitors and their list acted differently. Oh, wow. Interesting. And you would think, yeah, yeah. They would act somewhat the same. Interesting. And they didn't interesting.

Matthew Dunn: so

Scott Cohen: it's see. You just gotta dive [00:56:00] in and, and, and yeah, that's,

Matthew Dunn: it sounds like you're not gonna get bored in this space, which is wonderful.

You don't get bored

Scott Cohen: in this space. You can't get, you can't get bored in this space. Like you just, cuz there's always gonna be again, there's an offensive line. There's always gonna be someone coming down the, the pipe that wants to knock your program off down. Right.

Matthew Dunn: that? That's awesome. And I love you.

You're last with the high level low level. I, that may be the, the, the lead lining notes about this show and a, and a good note to close it. Nice. Nice. Nice thoughts about the future of email. Thank you. No, thanks. I

Scott Cohen: didn't think I had anything when we started, so

Matthew Dunn: yeah. Yeah. I, I, I, I knew you gotta suss it out.

Well, we'll wrap and let you go do email marketing. My guest has been Scott Cohen. Thank you, Scott. It was wonderful to talk with you about this stuff. Absolutely.

Scott Cohen: Matt, anytime.

[00:57:00]